vanish in parallel. We walk through ideal urban
planning purged of nature and every irregularity,
towards we know not what, blissfully ignorant
but borne up by this perfectly oriented space.
A contralto voice responds to a clarinet
and we might wish the duet to last forever,
but as soon as the record stops, we hear
the myriad voices of the crickets through
the mid-September night, rediscovering time
and this rainy summer that never seems to end.
Of these songs one listens to with all one’s soul
drunk with memory, dazed by what exists, and
lost between near and far, so that death,
we hope, may seize it in all ravishment,
which is the more beautiful? We cannot say,
in this dreaming dusk that is all of life.
You gaze at the window coated with black,
and striving to describe the city’s expanse
through such a mild early autumn night,
you search for words that might raise up,
from a perfectly level horizon, the lemon
disk of a moon never seen except in painting.
For then volumes of shadow could be created,
with infinite space opening out between them.
But there’s only this black, inked evenly in
and lacking all depth, but with, here and there,
patches of lighted windows, and the speckles
of street lights … which everyone has already seen.
A driver stopped at a red light
sees the ages of life pass in front of him:
slender, supple schoolgirls, in uniform,
and old women alone, carrying bags,
as well as old men, just as alone, crossing
with slow steps. The street becomes an allegory.
Working people pass by, a couple,
a man walking a dog. All that’s missing,
under a tree or in some recessed spot,
is a grizzled reaper with a scythe, maybe brandishing
an hourglass as well. The driver listens,
distractedly, to the five o’clock news.
A rowan branch looms up out of the fog
in which all else is progressively dissolved
like the background of a photograph when
the zoom, focused on the central figure,
drowns and dilutes the rest in light.
The rowan’s vermillion clusters stand out,
lacquered with moisture, as incredibly clear
as if painted by Georgia O’Keeffe, although
she would have cut even that surrounding space,
grey on grey, where the light turns to haze,
and the knot of branches, a copper-green mass,
which is the single scrap of reality to be seen.
The October light is splintering
through the prism of the first frosts;
since it’s freezing now at night,
the vegetation has taken on colours
that seem almost lacquered or varnished,
diffracting the sunlight in the streets.
Suddenly we realize that we’re living
inside the universal clock, of which we
are only a tiny cogwheel. Red is mixed
with everything, the wind dumps it in the streets;
we catch ourselves dragging our feet through it
like a schoolboy whose homework isn’t done.
A manuscript with crossings out, some books,
a few of them open, others in stacks,
a glass of pens, a paper cutter, scissors,
a ruler, a notebook, several pencils,
a pad of squared-off paper, a laptop computer,
an ashtray, a lighter, a packet of cigarettes;
all this would make up a still life,
unless you added—but he’s here already—
a man, dreaming amongst these things and
facing an autumn landscape that fills the window,
which would result in another recognized genre:
the portrait of the artist in his studio.
Patches of sunlight on the blind,
mingled with shadows more or less dense,
produce an effect, as in the cave,
or on a movie screen, of a shadow of
something that may be only a shadow
or, as Plotinus thought, a chain
of increasingly tattered shadows.
The wind has cleared the sky of
the veil of haze that was clouding it.
We’ve raised the blind, opened the curtains
and gaze into an illusion of blue infinity
that stretches out and away, away, away.
Here on this side are the call letters PA
for Latin, and over there the letters PQ
for Romance literature, which is to say
for paradise: so much prose and poetry
that a blissful eternity would not suffice
for us to read it all, from Lucretius and Horace
to Saint-Denys Garneau, Borges and Montale,
from Aulus Gellius to Joubert, to Cioran, to Léautaud.
One could just as well say Seneca, and Ponge, and Leopardi,
Petrarch, Pessoa, Montaigne … one recites these names
and those of Sbarbaro, Erasmus, or Marteau, giddy
at having inhaled the inexhaustible catalogue.
The garden’s chirping since a flock of starlings
swooped down on the trees around it.
There must be hundreds of them out there to form
such a resounding orchestra, endlessly
repetitive and full-throated, with amplitude
variations that are hollowing out space.
More reminiscent of Philip Glass than of Messiaen,
it’s like a symphony with neither start
nor finish, made up of a single chord
sustained, layered, unfurled, as if flinging
an immense hurrah into the whirling
of the leaves in the autumn sunlight.
The wind scatters leaves into the light
while a flock of black birds passes over
in apparent disorder, but that’s an illusion,
since all is structure without your knowing it.
You see the rain mixing a vortex of glimmers
into the torrent of sunlight, and you realize
that it’s all music, moving and alive;
that this isn’t a picture for you to gaze at,
languidly, at your leisure, but a great river
sweeping you away, and that it’s this morning
in October, the first and last in all the world.
Your existence is not really important.
Pensively, a cat pads off down the laneway
between board fences enclosing small gardens,
crumbs or metaphors for that absolute garden, the earth.
Along cracks in the asphalt run threads of grass
whose pattern may spell out the inconceivable
name of God, or the shape of the world.
Busy with matters known only to him, the cat
sidesteps old papers, shattered glass, tin cans,
nameless objects highlighted by the sun.
We can’t approach him; as soon as we step forward,
he walks calmly away, sure as he is of escaping
in a single bound should we try to catch him.
The fog pressing on the windows
adds to the silence in the house.
No car has gone by yet.
The city seems to be sleeping the sleep
of thousands of sleepers, each in his dream,
in his own chaotic, private world.
The newspaper hasn’t been delivered yet,
the kitchen’s raw light picks out each object,
even if
night still lingers in the corners.
On the table, the basket of fruit is
trying hard, without success, to look
like the one that Caravaggio painted.
Let’s lift our faces to this October sunlight,
and close our eyes; at once we’ll share
the entirely philosophical well-being of the cat
who’s stretched out in the grass,
unmoved that the wind around him is stirring up
a shifting edifice of perfumes.
Its brightness sifts down through the maple which,
in another day or two, will have few leaves left,
so that we’ll see the bare bones of its branches
beneath the blue enhanced by clouds,
like a temple built of columns only, through which
a god might pass, what god we do not know.
The city’s never so lovely as in the afternoon,
between three and four, with the day lowering,
in November. The light spreads, an ever finer
dusting of weightlessness over the stones,
with dim figures walking the dreaming streets
as they sink deeper amongst tall buildings.
Everywhere windows are lighting up. They cast
glimmering nets that may catch a face,
momentarily, then another, not as ghosts,
but seizing each in his singular eternity,
while the doorways of stores are lighting up
under shreds of sky whence falls the night.
All of autumn, finally, is only a sepia snapshot
with crackled edges, in which we see
some elms thrusting their branches’ inky
strokes up against a troubled sky.
All of autumn, finally, is only a pack
of commonplaces, regrets for that which was
and was not, a wasteland swept by the wind
until, one morning, crossing the park, we feel
the grass crunch underfoot; it froze overnight,
and in the life-giving cold, in the air
that we breathe in with delight, suddenly
we know that winter’s light is on its way.
Three men are tarring a roof.
Through the icy air we see steam
condensing round their backlit silhouettes.
It lends their movements that solemnity
produced in the movies by slow motion.
The winter sun climbs so imperceptibly
that time seems to have stopped.
We hear their voices when their work
is more difficult, but mostly they’re silent
and we hear only hammer blows
ringing the sky’s colossal bell
where the white light spreads and grows.
All is given at every instant in the space that
unfolds for the glance forever unwearied
of seeing what there is to see. One can begin
anywhere and follow the tremors of the light
beneath the sky’s ever-present vault
where a cloud of birds is wheeling.
The wind shakes the shadows on the walls
still holding day’s glow. Time does not pass.
It has never passed, since Achilles never does
catch up with the tortoise, since we never see but
that which is painted before our eyes: this street,
this rustle of sunlight blending into the air.
Through the rain, the leafless rowan tree
seems as if painted in stipples
that hint at its brownish-black lines.
The old masters knew how
to apply such touches, by means of which
reality might be recognized.
To left and right and out in front,
we see street lights and their reflections,
a sequence of patches the eye follows
in their random distribution through a space
furnished with masses that are sometimes
objects, and sometimes shadows.
The bread bag lies on the kitchen counter,
with the bread beside it, under the white light
that casts a round gleam on the tomatoes.
To the right, they’re flanked by green patches of basil,
to the left, we see an onion, the salt shaker,
the pepper mill, and a bottle of oil.
This is almost a recipe, with the knife
beside the cutting board. On the table,
the basket of apples and plums makes up
a more usual design in yellow, red and blue,
although we are no less beguiled
by the same virtues of the frugal and the familiar.
A banner of clouds, the rising sun,
the point of view from which we look (a height
that lays the city out in panorama)
conspire to cloak the horizon in a canvas
painted with mountains we never knew were there,
like an Andean cordillera or the Himalayas,
of no substance other than the air, the damp,
the dawn brushing the rooftops. In the distance,
their lack of reality is not obvious to the eye
and we’re inspired with a longing to deny
that these roofs and streets are realer, made of
harder brick and concrete than that veil of vapour.
All seems at a standstill in this quiet neighbourhood.
It could be Thursday morning, or the afternoon
of any other day. One checks one’s watch. Outside
and looks at the snow that’s blurring the light, a
prismatic dust falling from a sky where hangs
a sun that we can stare straight into.
Could we gaze at death like that, unblinking? Maybe,
if it was just as veiled and if it opened out
like this snow-softened day, like this space
where chimney smoke lifts and thins, like this street.
The woman collects her bag and crosses with slow steps.
Night has settled its simplest scene at the window;
red beacons from the radio tower flash the message
that the dark stretching out through the upper air
is an area of space that features solid objects,
into which one may crash, should one be a plane,
a bird, or an angel, and stray into this space.
Lower down, brick walls lit up by street lights
present a curtain cut through by angles and pierced
with windows in asymmetrical distribution.
Sometimes lamps are lit there and if, as here,
the curtains are not drawn, they offer the view
of a monad, enclosed between walls and a ceiling.
Northern birds are almost always in
the colours of wood, their feathers resembling
nothing so much as shades of bark.
The cardinal’s an exception, so dazzling
you’d think him dreamt up by a hobbyist god
or drawn by a child who’s just been given
coloured crayons and sheets of plain white
paper; he puts in a red patch, adds
a squiggle for the ruff, another for the rather
jaunty tail, and the buttery point of the beak
planted in the black mask. Then he crumples
the scrawl as fast as the bird blurs into the air.
The trees lift up the lightweight net
of their leafless crowns to the cloudy sky
that encompasses all beneath its arch.
There streams from it an even light, giving
all things their true colours; lacking the shadow
of darker tones to enhance the contrast
of their faces turned to the brightness,
this day swims all in the same waters, r
ising
and falling all together, all at the same time.
And what at first one takes for silence
is revealed as music, in such perfect measure
that we breathe to its rhythm, attuned to the whole.
Seize this winter day, under its demure and
fading sky, and this balmy-seeming air,
so warm is the sun on the grass in the park.
It should be covered by now. Only the snow
should smooth the sweep, which would
then be just as you picture nothingness:
devoid of qualities, and tainting even
the possibility that there may exist
the irreplaceable paradise of a single thing,
and one thing only. Do not indulge in imagining
a whiteness such as might bestow a face
on disappearance. That would be wrong.
The poet stepped up to the microphone
in front of the few people making up
the small audience that had come to hear him read.
In the bookstore window, before going in,
he’d seen his little book beneath a notice
which said “Sunday Poetry Readings.”
He took a swallow of water, smiled quickly,
leafed through his book and hesitated to read the poem
that he’d nonetheless chosen when preparing.
He blurted out some words of explanation,
put his hand in his pocket, and then a different voice
was heard, which was and was not his own.
So much softness is a presage of snow;
the day has closed in, the air taken on
a scent of wood and of damp stone.
All seems to be waiting, motionless—
the houses, people in the street, traffic—
all displays itself, even the shadows.
We hear the cawing of a crow
and search for him in vain through
the fine network of small branches.
Then the clouds release, from zenith
to horizon, a downy light which
resolves itself, slowly, into flakes.